Archives for October 2015

The building was a tinderbox, especially in the dog days of summer. The oppressive heat, the close quarters, and the strain of trying to make ends meet pushed people to the brink of violence. Was there ever a night when a tenant didn’t wish for thicker walls, when he wasn’t tainted by the bad blood in a neighboring apartment?

♦

Ralph lives and dies with the Dodgers, and he’s spent the better part of the last month dying. Thirteen games in front and it looks like a lock. Then it’s down to eight and it looks like anything but. Durocher and company keep reeling off wins and the Dodgers play like they miss being called bums. The slide takes its toll: Ralph is even more irritable than usual, he’s taking potshots at Alice with greater frequency and greater gusto. After one particularly devastating loss he stops at a luncheonette and picks up his very first pack of cigarettes. His uniform reeks; it takes only two days to burn a small hole in the lapel. If nothing else he figured it would curb his appetite but no such luck: he’s eating like there’s no tomorrow, even if everything tastes vaguely of smoke.

Wayne Michael Winfield is a writer and creative director at a New York advertising agency. He has written a memoir, A Heart Out of Tune, and a collection of essays about golf titled An Eloquence Words Can Only Envy. He has two children and lives in Westchester, New York.

On se comprend à demi-mots. “We understand each other with half words, without finishing our sentences.” I learned this French expression from Fanny. It describes a kind of meeting of the minds, parallel sensibilities—each of us not merely anticipating or knowing what the other is thinking, but actually thinking alike at the same time, sharing the same reaction. It was a good way of describing our personal connection. Fanny remarked how striking it was that such complicity could exist between a young American student, born after the war, and a Polish-born Viennese refugee, French resister, survivor of two concentration camps, and lifelong Communist Party activist.

Fanny and I met in April 1978, on a train from Paris to East Berlin, for a pilgrimage to Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp for women, for the most part political prisoners. The pilgrimage, as it was (and is still) known, was an annual event organized by the Amicale de Ravensbrück, the association of former women prisoners that formed in 1945 for the purpose of educating the public about the camp, supporting the survivors, lobbying the government for recognition and benefits. Like the other amicales, or “friendship associations,” it was part of a network united by the umbrella organization FNDIRP, the National Federation of Deported and Imprisoned Resistance Fighters and Patriots. I was in Paris with a year-long fellowship to study the role of women in the French Resistance. Having contacted the organization in an effort to locate and interview women resisters, I met with its director, Cécile Lesieur. The timing was excellent; it so happened that some eighty survivors of Ravensbrück would soon be traveling to the camp for a pilgrimage. Cécile Lesieur invited me to join them. I could meet the members myself and visit the camp for the first time.

Up to now she’s never thought of the danger animals present to her personally. She has a working knowledge of such words as trample, maul, swarm, impale, but she’s never imagined in her own life they would pertain. It’s true that the town has become more or less overrun with whitetail deer—on the golf course when she drives by with her mom on the way to swim meets, in the yard every day eating everything, the mothers and young in daytime and at dusk, among the trees, in the shadows and in the sweep of the highbeams, and the carcasses of them, broken on the shoulder, like dirty laundry, or else eviscerated beyond comparison to anything. The twitchy does, the fawns nearly grown. Clemmie at ten and a half has seen her first buck. At ten and a half she’s become something of an early riser. She’s begun to have trouble sleeping. In her house she’s often the first to wake and, in the robe that bears her initials but has become too short to truly be hers, she steeps what is commonly known as herbal tea but is more properly referred to as a tisane or an infusion. According to her brother. Mint in the warmer months, although she’s begun her transition to chamomile. It was chamomile this morning, chilly but not too cold to sit outside in the air, robe but no slippers even, to feel the brick night-damp beneath her feet, begin to remember her dreams. She’d been thinking about deer. It was difficult to explain how it felt, to see them. They were wild animals. It seemed certain that they had thoughts, though she understood this to be impossible. Their flanks when they walked, the hitch in their stride, very slight, unlike horses, or dogs, and this moment she always seemed to miss when a deer in stillness became a deer in motion. They had become bold, if you drove slowly they would stare at you, into your face. In some way this was connected in her mind to her sighting of a celebrity, while visiting her brother in the city, a character in a show she’d seen many times on sleepovers, in line at the coffee place where the chocolate croissants were so good—she had looked so real. Small shoulders, clothes from a store. Not so much in relation to her televised image as in relation to the memory of her televised image. And it was in fact at a sleepover that she’d tried to express this. That it was somehow the same, for her, with deer. Sonia with a mouthful of yogurt had said that literally deers were the new squirrels. Clemmie had been thinking about this. She was a child and children liked to see animals. With her toes she’d tried to grip the brick, this was a way of starting her blood, a slow start, in which regard her tea was useless, she knew. It was only recently that she’d been permitted to handle the kettle. She’d watched her teabag spin on its string, dripping. The brick patio was not only damp but truly cold. The air was incredibly clear but also, she thought, almost visible. There was a moment that she saw the deer and there was a separate moment that she saw the antlers. Her heart froze. It could be said that it was standing fast. They’d become bold, deer, and Clemmie had too, apparently; she approached the buck with her tea mug, having realized too late she’d forgotten to leave it, and she said to herself that she’d like to try to enjoy this. It was breathing. Its fur was hair, but very fine and dense. He—his. Head inclined. So easily he could do her harm. Utter stillness. She has no way of knowing, now only hours later, whether the picture she holds in her head of this deer is a picture of the deer she’s seen or a picture of her own creation whose purpose is to hold the place of this event in her memory. So much of her life has become this way.

“I saw a pack of wolves,” her father says. “Up north of Oneonta.”

“You saw a pack of coyotes,” her brother says. “If you saw anything.”

“That’s what the gas station guy said. I said fuck you, these were wolves.

Confluences

After collaborating on the autobiographies of some of the world’s most famous subjects, Peter Knobler turns towards home and writes about memory, music, and his mother. “When I was growing up we had spent many Sunday mornings in our Greenwich Village home listening to Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, the Weavers—records that now sat on her shelves like tablets.”